When we think of piranhas, we often conjure up an image of fearsome predators that can strip an animal to its skeleton in seconds. Their bad reputation stems, in part, from President Theodore Roosevelt, who, after a trip to the Amazon, wrote that they were the "most ferocious fish in the world."
"They will snap a finger off a hand incautiously trailed in the water; they mutilate swimmers — in every river town in Paraguay there are men who have been thus mutilated; they will rend and devour alive any wounded man or beast; for blood in the water excites them to madness," he wrote in his book "Through the Brazilian Wilderness."
